UK Elections: They’re Not Like Ours! Plus, the Messy Family Behind Paramount
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Brits are complaining it's too long. They're saying three weeks, is it still not over yet? In the UK, the election season lasts six weeks. Can you imagine? From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Also on this week's show, hundreds of post office workers in the UK were prosecuted under mysterious circumstances and largely ignored until a TV show ignited a fire.

I don't think you can point to a single television drama which has had such a huge impact, both in terms of public anger and then political movement. Plus, what the tabloidy history of Paramount can teach us about corporate media today. One of them says, I don't care if 100 women or 50 women come forward with more accusations about Moonves. He's our guy. That's so preposterous. Moonves is not anybody's guy on the board of directors.

It's all coming up after this. On the Media is supported by BetterHelp. Halloween is the season when we start to see people wearing masks and costumes, but sometimes it can feel like we wear a mask and hide more often than we want to, like at our jobs, at work, or around our friends and family. Therapy can help you learn to accept all parts of yourself so you can take off the mask, because masks should be used for Halloween celebrations, not for our emotions.

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Next time on The New Yorker Radio Hour, how Kamala Harris became a contender. People, I gather, were asking her, do you think there should be a process? Some town halls or conventions? And her answer was, I'm happy to join a process like that, but I'm not going to wait around. I'm not going to wait around. Evan Osnos on the rise of Kamala Harris. Next time on The New Yorker Radio Hour. Listener supported. WNYC Studios.

From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. Michael Loewinger is out this week. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Back in January, there was speculation that 2024 would see both British and American leadership elections. And sure enough, in late May, drenched in the pouring rain in front of 10 Downing Street, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak delivered. Now is the moment for Britain to choose its future.

to decide whether we want to build on the progress we have made or risk going back to square one with no plan and no certainty. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak just called for a surprise early election on July 4th.

Jonathan Friedland, a columnist at The Guardian, has written about the two other times in history when our elections overlapped with our cousins across the pond. But before we tackle that, I asked him to lay out the differences between British and American electioneering, starting with the fact that there are no primaries and political campaigns in the UK are just six weeks long. No perpetual campaign?

What bliss. And yet. Brits are complaining it's too long that it's six weeks. They're saying three weeks, is it still not over yet? There's no TV advertising. It's not allowed.

So much less expensive. Oh, it's pocket change what a British election costs. A minor race in Indiana's second district would burn through the money that is spent on an entire UK general election. And there are very severe spending limits and they are policed. I mean, candidates can go to jail for breaching them. But the big difference, I think, is very relevant in terms of your recent experience and perhaps the experience that's coming in terms of contesting an election and claiming it's rigged

A British election, there are no machines, there are no levers that anyone pull. Instead, you have a small piece of paper and a stubby pencil, and you have to mark an X by the name of the candidate you choose. And that is it. They are then counted by hand.

one piece of paper after another. And if someone wants a recount, all the pieces of paper are there. That means all of the claims about rigging and so on, they don't really ever get off the ground because they know that a British election can't really be tampered with.

Our elections have overlapped with yours twice in recent history, in 64 and 92. You've noted some patterns in how those elections have influenced each other. Would you start with 64, the year that Labor's Harold Wilson was running against the conservative incumbent Alec Douglas Holm? That was just three weeks before the U.S. presidential election. What happened there?

There have been these very rare moments where the stars align on both sides of the Atlantic. The big influence there was in a way retrospective. Harold Wilson was offering himself

Not as the British Lyndon Johnson, who was the Democrat on the ballot in the United States in the autumn of 1964, but rather as Lyndon Johnson's predecessor, as a British Kennedy. Wilson was the new generation. He was younger by British political standards. He was the first candidate for that high office who had actually been born in the 20th century.

He also, like Kennedy, wanted to be associated with technology. So there was John F. Kennedy in launching the moonshot. Harold Wilson in Britain was talking about this phrase, the white heat of technology that was going to change everything. The Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or for outdated methods on either side of industry. He even borrowed that signature phrase of JFK's, the new frontier,

that Labour would take Britain to the new frontier. So modernity, youth, vigour, technology, those were all Kennedy-esque motifs. And Harold Wilson won that 1964 election.

So there was a real Kennedy mania in Britain. I remember my own father saying he stopped wearing a hat in the 60s because Kennedy didn't wear a hat. The hat makers were very unhappy in the US. But let's jump to 92. Conservative incumbent John Major was fighting to keep his seat in the UK, and he viewed the US Democratic challenger Bill Clinton as a threat.

You see here a very clear overlap. In that case, it wasn't just overlap. There was actually cooperation or even, if you want to use a charge word, collusion. I mean, the Conservatives who were in government in London worked with, covertly, the Bush administration and the Republicans to

Washington. It was George Herbert Walker Bush seeking re-election, as you say. There was an operation to dig up some dirt on Bill Clinton, who had lived in Britain. He had been a student at Oxford Road Scholar in the 60s. The British Home Office went through their files to dig up what they had on Bill Clinton and did indeed find useful things there about his travel, including that he did make a trip to Moscow. And that featured then

in the Bush campaign against Clinton, trying to suggest he was red under the bed. That was covert help given by Britain, by John Major, to George H.W. Bush, partly because if an American president asks, a British prime minister is very reluctant ever to say no.

The Brits did have their own motive a little bit. They were suspicious of Bill Clinton in terms of his position on Northern Ireland. And the suspicion then was that he would be a sympathiser to the nationalist or Republican, mainly Catholic, side. And therefore, I don't think it took much persuasion for John Major to do a favour for his friend across the Atlantic in what was for both an election year.

John Major was trailing in the polls, but he did win in 92. People thought that George H.W. Bush would do the same, but he didn't. As you observed, the generation that took over after Major lost to Tony Blair in 1997. And that Blair copied a lot of Clinton's tactics.

It's quite right. In the 90s, you couldn't move if you were in Dulles Airport for British politicians from the British Labour Party who were coming in and out of DC to get advice from Team Clinton. They were engaged, they believed, in almost identical projects, which was just as Bill Clinton did.

had dragged his party to the electable center as they saw it and casting himself as a new Democrat. So Tony Blair, together with Gordon Brown and a couple of others, embarked on a similar project, which was to drag Labour from the unelectable left as they saw it, because Labour had lost four elections in a row by the early 90s,

to a place that was new Labour, just like Bill Clinton was a new Democrat. They rebranded and they were constantly on the lookout for campaign techniques. You would hear Labour advisers saying, it's the economy, stupid, quoting that poster up on the wall in the Clinton war room. This was the period where British politicos in Westminster could recite verbatim scripts from the West Wing because they were so steeped in it

I love that you invoke the West Wing because you've observed that House of Cards, the Netflix series here, was actually drawn from a series about Westminster. Tour the corridors of power in House of Cards. I'm the chief whip, merely a functionary. I keep the troops in line. I put a bit of stick about them. I make them jump. And I shall, of course, give my absolute loyalty to whoever emerges as my leader.

Today, Henry Collingridge emerged as the popular choice to lead his party as Prime Minister. Well, let's see how he does. That's right. I mean, the traffic usually goes one way across the Atlantic. It's usually Brits learning from, aping, imitating the Americans. But every now and again, there's something the other way. So I always think of this one just because it's so rare. One of the very few times a bit of political craft

was taken from Britain by the Americans is none other than the American president today, Joe Biden. Everyone knows that Biden ran for the top office three times. The first time was all the way back in 1988. And one of the things that undid his campaign

was an allegation of plagiarism. I think slightly unfair allegation. I remember this. Because in that campaign in 88, in the Democratic primary, Joe Biden repeatedly would credit and quote the British Labour leader, Neil Kinnock. Neil Kinnock had said, Why am I...

The first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get the university. Joe Biden on the stump would say... Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university? Usually, he credited Kinnock for that. But on this one occasion, he didn't. And therefore, he was open to this allegation.

of plagiarism. And it was one of the things that damaged it. Hard to believe now when presidential candidates get away with much more, including conviction of crimes. Those were innocent times. But let's jump to this year. How will these two elections interact?

You've observed that the Labour Party has been quite admiring of Biden's presidential record. Will the Labour Party's candidate, Keir Starmer, look to Biden for anything? You hear all the time Labour people saying they want to do a Biden. They want to do in 2024 what Joe Biden did in 2020. Joe Biden managed to be sufficiently inoffensive

to be a receptacle for all of the voters who were disaffected with Donald Trump. Biden didn't have enough negatives to put people off doing that. In a way, that Biden strategy has become Keir Starmer's. As We Speak Labour has just launched its platform, there's almost nothing really new or provocative or controversial in it because they think in 2020, Biden won by being not Trump.

And they want Starmer to win by being not conservative. I just want to shift gears. This month, there's been some drama unspooling at The Washington Post. Its new publisher and CEO, Will Lewis, was poached straight from Fleet Street where print news is...

almost inextricable from politics. He used to work at The Telegraph, which has a staunch pro-Tory stance. He's been in hot water for his role in manipulating news reporting to try and clean up the phone hacking scandal at the Murdoch papers over a dozen years ago. Some of the coverage claims that the British press is just inherently different from the U.S. press and that Lewis is a creature of the British press.

What do you think of that framing, first of all? I mean, it's partly because of how partisan

The British press always has been. When American newspapers 20, 30 years ago would bend over backwards to seem completely neutral, the British newspapers, famously associated with Fleet Street here in London, were engaged in a raucous competition, elbowing each other aside in nakedly political competition. So you'd have the Telegraph, as you said, which is conservative, but

Most of the newspapers actually are pro-Tory, pro-right-wing papers, whether it's The Sun, The Mail, The Telegraph. And then more or less on their own is a left-of-center newspaper, my own one, The Guardian. There's also The Mirror, a tabloid, a noisy, vigorous press where there is no shame or pretense about coming at the news with an attitude. But the sheer competition, because seven or eight national newspapers all headquartered in one city—

meant that the ethos was one of aggressive news gathering, getting scoops and stealing a march on your rivals. The American newspaper market, you would have these big city monopolies, one, sometimes two papers. It meant those newspapers could take their time. They didn't mind holding a story till the next day or the day after. Better to be right than first. They were much more stately.

And I do think there's a political culture difference too, which is the rise of the activist newsroom, where newsrooms are often racked over issues of identity politics and diversity and that kind of thing. There is just a degree of impatience in a lot of these British newspapers, especially the ones that Will Lewis worked in,

not really interested in you and your identity, whether it's in terms of race or gender. I want to know if you've got the story. And if you haven't, there's the door. It would be a massive culture shock for a lot of American journalists to find themselves landing in a British newsroom

A lot of those differences have been smoothed in recent years because everyone's competing online and in the English language. Things have moved closer together. And so you saw the Post and the New York Times and the Trump period becoming, in a way, more opinionated. But there are still those differences. And I do think Will Lewis has probably walked right into them.

There's another media trope around all of this, that there is a British invasion of the U.S. media. Top media execs at The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and CNN, suddenly all British.

No, it's quite true that there are suddenly Brits in a lot of senior positions. It's not entirely new. There have been British journalists making great strides in American journalism for decades. Tina Brown at The New Yorker, the tabloid end of the American market would often have a Brit at the helm, New York Post and other places. But having so many at once, I agree, begins to look like a pattern. I don't know whether it is partly some of these publishers thinking,

We need people now who are used to being in a knife fight and who need to be aggressive.

We need people who are used to rolling up their sleeves and not afraid to get their hands very dirty in order to keep their share of the market, because that is what a British journalist at the editorial level is very used to doing. Or it could just be that it's just happened all at once. But either way, because we're journalists, we always do like to draw connections. Two is a coincidence, three is a trend. There are now three. It's

It's good Fleet Street practice, Brooke, for you to immediately want a trend story out of that. That's exactly what we would do here. So maybe our influence is rubbing off already. Thank you so much, Jonathan. My great pleasure. Guardian columnist Jonathan Friedland hosts the Politics Weekly America podcast. Coming up, staying in the UK, a story about how the Royal Mail delivered terrible news. This is on the media.

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James Baldwin is one of those writers who commands respect as well as love and affection. He was born 100 years ago this year. I'm Razia Iqbal. Join me for Notes on a Native Son, a special series from Notes from America with Ta-Nehisi Coates, Bryan Stevenson, Nikki Giovanni, and many others discussing their favorite passages by Baldwin. Listen to new episodes every Saturday in the Notes from America feed wherever you get your podcasts.

This is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. America's record of holding the rich and powerful to account is not the greatest. I mean, sure, Trump's now a felon, but who knows how much he'll really pay in terms of wealth or power.

Remember the 2008 global financial crisis? Not a single chief exec at any of the culpable mega banks went to jail. They just yachted off, leaving in their wake a new phrase, too big to fail.

But in the UK, the process of accountability is now in seriously bad odour after one particularly obtuse government entity, to hide a costly mistake, callously destroy the lives of many hundreds of hard-working Britons, and duct justice for decades. Now, however, comeuppance is finally afoot.

because a recent TV docudrama took on the story of justice denied and, crucially, engaged the public in a way journalism could not. And who is that rankest of villains, that infinite and endless liar?

none other than the great British post office. It was the most widespread miscarriage of justice in UK history. 700 hardworking postmasters and postmistresses prosecuted for theft, fraud and false accounting from the late 90s to 2015. But the problem was not the workers. It was dodgy accounting software. From 1999 to 2015, more than 900

Postmasters and mistresses, sub-postmasters they're called, were prosecuted, blamed for mistakes generated by Fujitsu's buggy horizon IT system, which was deployed at great expense and with much hoopla by the post office.

In the UK, local post offices are essentially franchises overseen by the national post office but owned and operated by private citizens. They have to make up for any shortfalls or they risk the sack or prosecution.

Like Lee Castleton, who bought a post office in East Yorkshire some 20 years ago. So we got to the Christmas of the first year, just six months in, and we had a misbalance. And we hadn't had a misbalance before.

It was for £1,103.68p, and I spent hours and hours and hours looking for why. Like many others, he covered the shortfalls with his dwindling savings. But the problem persisted. He suspected it lay in the new accounting software. But he was assured that no one else had this problem, and the post office helpline was no help at all. In fact, I made over 91 calls over the 12 weeks previously.

I constantly pestered and rang and rang and rang asking for help, and they just ignored me. At the end of his rope, he asked for an audit. The post office auditor arrived and claimed Lee owed £25,000. The post office took him to court to get him to repay, but he didn't have it. And being broke, he represented himself, while the post office's many barristers rang up £321,000 in legal fees.

When inevitably Lee lost, he was slammed with that bill along with the original $25,000. Devastating. My wife suffered seizures from anxiety, which led into epilepsy, which she'd never suffered before. And I started having problems with my vagus nerve, which meant that every so often my body would just stop and I would just, you know, collapse.

And then over the period after the court case, my eldest child, my daughter Millie, the only thing that she could control was her eating. And that led to her having an eating disorder, which lasted 10 years. The difficulties just caused my life and my family's life to disintegrate for years and just...

I was powerless to do anything, to help anything. And I was the only one, which is what the post office would say to us constantly. And it was that feeling of helplessness and being unable to make people understand that I'd never taken any money and we didn't deserve to be treated like we were being treated. Lee turned to the press for some computer savvy. There was a magazine in the UK called Computer Weekly that were offering technical help. I had this heap of paperwork from the court case.

It was a lot of riposte data that I just didn't, I couldn't understand. And I knew that somewhere in this paperwork must have been a reason because I knew the reason that the money was supposedly missing wasn't because it had been taken. I knew that. So it was a case of finding the real reason. So I reached out to Tony Collins, who's the editor of Computer Weekly.

He handed me a letter and it was from Lee Castleton. Reporter Rebecca Thompson. Hoping that one of us would be able to make some sense of what was going on. He lost everything, like lost his house, couldn't get a mortgage, couldn't get a bank account, had two young children whose entire childhoods had been coloured by this whole thing. And he was just a bit of a broken man, really.

After Rebecca published her investigation, six more sub-postmasters went on the record about weird problems with the software.

wow, this is big, she thought. But... There wasn't really much response. People were interested, but they would kind of look into it and then come back to us and say, oh no, we can't do anything with it. We got really close with Channel 4 News and then some editors somewhere got cold feet. We couldn't really get anyone to follow it up because it was the postmaster's word against the post offices and the post office was lying. The

The post office called up editors at major newspapers to discredit Computer Weekly's account. It stonewalled journalists and pressured the sub-postmasters to plead out to avoid jail time. Still, there were serious investigations, and in 2019, the high court did rule that the software was defective, that those convicted could move to have their convictions overturned, and claim compensation.

In fact, a public inquiry has been underway since 2021, but few noticed, and the march to accountability has been glacially slow. Until now. The decisive moment occurred on January 1st this year.

On New Year's Day, England is pretty much closed and people watch TV. That's when ITV, a British channel, presented the first in a four-part docudrama called Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office. The computer system Post Office spent an arm and a leg on is faulty. No one else has ever reported any problems with Horizon. No one. You're responsible for the loss. I haven't got that money.

I don't know where it's gone. I think it made a phenomenal amount of difference. Journalist Nick Wallace has long covered the story, authored the book The Great Post Office Scandal, and consulted on the drama. He reckons that if some 10% of the public had heard about the scandal before January 1st, 2024, now it's more like 80 or 90%.

My feet didn't really hit the ground after the drama started going out because my phone kept ringing and people kept wanting to talk to me on the radio and the TV and the like. So six days after episode four had finished,

I thought, well, just sit down and watch the evening news just to see what else is going on in the world. And as I sat down and watched the BBC 10 o'clock news, the first three pieces were all about the post office scandal. A giant step towards justice for hundreds of innocent people caught up in the post office scandal. Now, you do not get the first three pieces of a television news bulletin unless it's something like

Russia going into Ukraine or Israel going into Gaza. The idea that the BBC would spend its first three pieces talking about the post office scandal sparked by a drama made by a competitor channel.

was just mind-blowing. And that, to me, will always stick in my mind as to the impact that this drama had on the body politic, on the media, on the national conversation. It was electrifying and infuriating. Suddenly, a quarter century since the first complaints about the software, the post office faced real consequences for throwing Lee Castleton and hundreds like him under a bus. Mediator

Many sub-postmasters went to jail. Many more bankrupted themselves to cover the mysterious shortfalls. A few killed themselves, and quite a few have since died waiting for justice.

Some context. When in 1999 the Post Office deployed the Horizon software to its more than 18,000 branches, it was described as the largest IT system in Europe. The fundamental problem was it didn't work. It couldn't add up properly. And yet the Post Office, rather than trust its sub-postmasters who were having all sorts of problems getting their accounts to balance after they imported this new system,

actually believed that what the IT system was showing was the level of criminality that was going on in the branches up and down the country. And

And one thing we learned from the drama and the reporting is that Fujitsu knew that it had been prematurely implemented. And so workers would slip into various postmasters' accounts in order to sort of fix the bugs, maybe introduce some new ones, while these sub-postmasters were being told there is no problem, that their complaints are the only complaints. I can't understand why it's happened again. Me neither. Nobody else has these problems. It says, I've taken...

£2,032.67 more than I think I have. Okay, re-declare your stock holding so that will automatically create a discrepancy, okay? That will have inflated your cash holding so now I want you to reverse that difference. Righto. So now if you re-declare everything it will balance, okay? Oh my god, it's just doubled right in front of my eyes. Now it says I'm £4,000 down.

The post office had basically bet the farm on this system working. They had...

decided that they had to sell the Horizon system, not just to the postmasters and the public, but also to big institutional clients who would bolt on their systems into the Horizon system to allow the post office to sell products like foreign exchange, travel insurance, for banks to be able to use banking services through the system. So they could not have any word getting out that this Horizon system was shaky. And yet internally,

It knew that it was. The system was not fit for purpose when it was rolled out in October 1999. And in November 1999, there was a secret internal Fujitsu report written by their internal auditor who said that the cash accounting integrity of their IT system, which was at the very heart

of Horizon software simply could not be relied on. So the post office and Fujitsu knew this system was incredibly shaky, and yet they inflicted it on these poor sub-postmasters and then pursued them for these phantom discrepancies. It's incredible.

How did you first come to this story? I was working in a local radio station in Surrey in 2010 when I got a tweet from a company called Surrey Cars telling me that they wanted to bid for the BBC Surrey taxi account. I think I said something flippant like, oh, it depends whether your drivers have got any great stories that they want to come on air and tell us. And Surrey Cars tweeted back saying, oh, I've got a story to tell you, all right. Give me a call after you've finished your show.

So I called up Sari Kars and Sari Kars turned out to be a one-man band called Devinder Misra. And over 40 very tearful minutes, he told me how his pregnant wife had been thrown in prison for a crime she didn't commit. By that stage, Alan Bates had already formed the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance. So within an hour of talking to Devinder, I was talking to Alan.

That's the Alan Bates of the series Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office. He knew his way around computers and, convinced that the software was fishy, he refused to sign off on the reports it was generating. So he was fired, lost most of his savings, retired with his wife to the countryside, obsessed with the unfairness of it all, and ultimately found a way to gather some of the far-flung victims together. ♪

We've been talking to people across the South accused of cooking the books, but they swear they've done nothing wrong. So what's up behind the counters of our post offices? Nick Wallace reports. And that's how my interest in the story started. The story is fascinating on its face. We're also interested in it because it took so long to break into the public eye.

Part of it is because it's a very difficult story to tell. You have to explain what sub-postmasters are, the nature of their relationship with the post office, their sort of self-employed franchisee-cum-agent who have invested in the business but still represent the government-owned business.

post office, then you've got to say, well, they believe that this IT system is throwing up discrepancies, which they're being held criminally liable for. And then on top of that, you had the fact that so many of these sub-postmasters had pleaded guilty to the crimes which they now say they weren't responsible for. And so you had these layers and layers of difficulty in selling these stories to newspaper editors or TV commissioners because it was just so knotty.

And frankly, if it wasn't for Alan Bates taking the post office to the high court and having a brilliant high court judge, actually, who understood the issues inside out, pull them apart line by line, line of code by line of code, piece of evidence by piece of documentary evidence, then we wouldn't have got this story out into the public domain at all. Toby Jones plays Bates with sly pugnacity and an unshakable sense of purpose.

They say money's somehow gone missing from this branch, which it hasn't, and I have to pay it back, which I won't. So I say, prove it. Prove that I'm wrong and you're right. Show me the figures. But they can't or won't do that. Alan. So now they want to close me down to shut me up. That's ridiculous! Because they don't want everyone knowing what I know. Which is? That the fancy new computer system that they've spent an arm and a leg on is faulty.

Now there's a public inquiry underway through the end of July to uncover more details about the scandal, including who's to blame. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak introduced a bill to exonerate all the wrongly convicted postmasters. And the head of the post office during the height of the scandal, Paula Venels, had her CBE, an honor awarded by the British Empire, revoked.

And viewers could watch her cry in hearings about three weeks ago. I fully accept now that the post office, excuse me, the post office knew that. I completely accepted. Personally, I didn't know that. And I'm incredibly sorry that that happened to those people and to so many others. And you believe that the drama actually made all this possible? So the impact of Mr Bates versus the post office...

I think is unprecedented. Certainly in the UK, I don't think you can point to a single drama, television drama, which has had such a huge impact, both in terms of public anger and then political movement for decades, if ever. The TV show was the result of a decade of journalism and sub-postmasters refusing to give up on trying to get justice.

Now the success of the show has led to more journalism, more media, and attempts to get accountability. Sometimes it feels like we live in an age where powerful people seem untouched by scandal. The scandal is a story where the truth is finally coming out, albeit slowly. Victims are being believed. Does this make you feel any differently about journalism and accountability?

Well, Brooke, you may disagree, but I think the American system is far more effective than the system we've got over here in the UK. You have politically appointed prosecutors who follow public opinion and the political priorities of the people who elected them. And when it comes to white-collar crime like this,

They are exceptionally good at presenting evidence to people lower down the chain who might then plead guilty to a lesser crime and offer the evidence that they have so that you're able to go after the people who are ultimately responsible, the chief executives of an organization who may have failed catastrophically. You mean the presidents of the United States? Yeah, well, there's the ultimate example, isn't it? What's been happening in recent weeks. But I mean, I think the United States, much better than our system has,

us over here. If you look at all the scandals that we've had in this country, the infected blood scandal, the Windrush scandal, the banking crisis, Hillsborough, the various NHS scandals, how many people have actually gone to prison? How many people have actually been successfully criminally prosecuted as a result of them? Almost none.

And we don't have the laws, actually, that will make executives in this country look at a problem and say, if I don't do something proactive and positive about this, there's a good chance I'll go to jail. This job has taught me that we've got things wrong in this country when it comes to incentivizing people to do the right thing. It may be that this scandal is so big and public awareness of it is so large that it becomes a game changer.

And things do happen more positively going forward. But at the moment, I'm not holding out much hope. And the weaker and weaker that journalism gets, the more under-resourced it gets, the less likely it is that these stories are going to be brought to the public's attention. We're still fighting. I wish it wasn't. But I'm ever so grateful that people are listening. It just shows you what you can do if you really want to do something.

You know, you can move mountains, can't you? You know, there's so many things that the drama has brought about. All of a sudden, people wanted to hear. I can't tell you how grateful the whole group are for that because sometimes, no matter how hard you scream, people don't react. But people are listening every day now, and that's quite wonderful. So what's it take to make a real difference without a TV show?

You need cinematic harm, sympathetic victims, and a perpetrator not too big to fail.

And no cynics. I mean, ultimately, the moral of this story, like so many we tell, is that when making things right requires a coalition of the law and journalism, politics and people, lots of people, cynicism is even more corrosive than the frantic attempts to cover butts inside the bunkers of government.

Coming up, the Redstones are on the rocks. This is On The Media. This episode is brought to you by Progressive. Most of you aren't just listening right now. You're driving, cleaning, and even exercising. But what if you could be saving money by switching to Progressive?

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This is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. So this week, Paramount Global, the company that once launched the likes of MTV, 60 Minutes, and The Daily Show, teetered on the edge of a massive merger. Sherry Redstone, the controlling shareholder, pursued the deal for over six months, despite the resignation of four board members. She even ousted the CEO of Paramount Global, who criticized the merger.

And then... There were several other bidders along the way, but the merger seemed almost certain until yesterday's abrupt collapse. Redstone pulled out at the last minute. One commentator called it, quote, the looniest sales process in the history of public companies. Wow, what a twist and turn. I mean, what options does she have left?

Really, we need a new reality program in here, Kelly. Like, you know, mergers that collapse. Shares in Paramount Global dropped nearly 8% once Redstone's decision got out, and the fate of the once formidable company twists in the wind.

But reality show type drama is in the Redstone tradition, which did not abate when Sherry inherited the company from her father, Sumner, who died in 2020 at the age of 97. He would joke that he did not need to make plans for succession because he was going to live forever. Was it a joke?

I was about to say, I think a lot of people thought he was only half-joking. Rachel Abrams is the co-author with James Stewart of Unscripted, the epic battle for a media empire and the Redstone family legacy. Let's talk about his kids. His son eventually got fed up, sold his shares of the company, moved to a ranch in Colorado, never spoke to the family again, didn't attend the father's funeral. His daughter, Sherry Redstone, he was even worse to her.

Yes, he would publicly berate his daughter. He would call her unfathomable things in emails that are seen by other people. He was so temperamental that, you know, there were points where he would say that he wanted Sherry Redstone to take over. And then later on, he would excoriate her. But no matter how badly he treated her, it was still her father. And up until the day he died, you know, she hoped that he loved her. Let's talk about then Sherry.

how Sherry actually saved him in a way. He was a real womanizer. He would pursue multiple women at the same time. Some of the women he had relationships with ended up working for his businesses. But he paid a hefty price for that in your telling of events.

He used his vast wealth and resources to take over the lives of women he was trying to pursue. There was a flight attendant on the corporate jets that he basically got fired, but then dangled job prospects in front of so that she would have dinner with him and accompany him to events.

You know, these are really objectionable, horrific ways to treat women. And as somebody writing about our book put it, two of his perhaps most observant students used his own tactics against him because toward the end of his life, when he was losing the ability to advocate for himself, you know, his cognitive function was deteriorating.

These two women, who at times were romantic partners or companions, maybe caregivers, Manuela Herzl and Sidney Holland, they basically, one after the other, move into his mansion and take over his life. They isolate him from his family. They tell him his family doesn't love him. And in one afternoon, each one of them was wired forever.

$45 million in a single afternoon. And these two women got very close to having Sumner add them to the trust controlling his empire, to gaining access to this multi-billion dollar media fortune. For all of Sumner Redstone's money and power and resources, you would think that there would be guardrails around him to keep out people like these women. And yet,

There weren't, in large part because Sumner had excommunicated everybody that really cared about him from his circles.

And let's talk about Sidney Holland. Apparently, Bravo's millionaire matchmaker, Patti Stanger, hooked him up with Sidney Holland. And less than a year later, he proposed to her. She moves in and takes on all the roles you mentioned. But apparently, it is his daughter who's finally able to loosen the grip of both Herzer and Holland. How did she do that?

Um, Stanger, as you mentioned, set up Sumner with Sidney Holland. And one thing that Patty Stanger told Sidney Holland was Sumner Redstone is old school. He is going to go out and do whatever he wants, but if you are to be involved with him, you cannot step out on this man. And Sidney Holland, unbeknownst to Sumner Redstone, was having an affair with a man named George Pilgrim in Sedona, Arizona. And she would take

the private jet to spend romantic afternoons and evenings with George. And then she'd fly home back to the Beverly Park mansion where Sumner lived before he had gone to sleep. So he would be none the wiser. And Sidney would just shower George Pilgrim, who was at one point an actor. He had a recurring role on a famous soap opera. He had been in a couple sort of cult hit movies. He had also been on my personal favorite credit, the History Channel's Ancient Aliens series.

And George is really into aliens. So he embarks on this whirlwind romance with Sidney Holland, who, by the way, says, I can buy your book. He was shopping a book at the time. I can make it into a movie. Any of your dreams, I can make it happen. In the midst of all of this, there are so many questions about Sumner's

cognitive abilities and who's really controlling him and what does this mean for the company. There's a lot of speculation in media circles and Bill Cohan, who was a reporter at Vanity Fair, gets interviews with both Manuela and Sidney and they're wearing ball gowns and professing their love for Sumner and

It's a fantastic feature. And Sidney Holland says in this article, it's quoted as talking about how much she loves Sumner and how beautiful his hair is. And in Sedona, Arizona, this article comes out and George Pilgrim, who thinks Sidney Holland is a woman he's going to marry and he's been having this affair with, he sees this.

He's infuriated and he's embarrassed. He calls up Bill Cohan, the Vanity Fair reporter, and he tells Bill, you know, how he and Sidney have actually been carrying on all this time. Bill writes another article. Sumner Redstone sees this, and much as Patty Stanger, the millionaire matchmaker, had warned Sidney Holland, he goes ballistic. He kicks out Sidney Holland. Manuela Herzer gets kicked out of the mansion. And after these two women leave his life...

That is when Sherry Redstone, his daughter, is able to come back in and start repairing the relationship with her father, get back in his good graces, spends more time with him, and ultimately cements her role as the successor to his media empire, which was very close to being taken over or at least partially taken over by these women.

So going back to the business behind all the drama, you didn't expect to tell the story of the Redstone family when you started your research, right? What was the story you were going to tell? At the height of the Me Too movement, The New Yorker published a couple stories about Les Moonves, the former head of CBS, in which a total of 12 women accuse him of sexual misconduct, you know, as far back as I think the late 80s, and supremacist.

September 2018 CBS announces that Moonves is out he's gone and

Jim got a tip that the real reason Moonves left CBS had nothing to do with the stories in The New Yorker, even though it appeared that way. Because every day, if you'll recall, in the fall of 2018, there was a news story about a new man being ousted for sexual misconduct accusations. But Jim had gotten a tip that it was actually because of Moonves' attempts to silence a woman he feared would go public with totally new accusations about

He was basically being blackmailed to keep this woman quiet by offering her film roles and doing other things. And when CBS investigators questioned him about this, he did a lot to mislead investigators. And it was that vulnerability to blackmail, that poor judgment that ultimately caused CBS to determine he was too much of a liability and needed to go. So Jim had gotten a tip about this.

And separately, I had heard from a source who was in this incredible position to know what the investigators had uncovered about Moonves' behavior. And Jim and I ended up pairing up, doing a few different stories for The New York Times. I think we wanted to elaborate on the story about what caused Les Moonves to be ousted from CBS and how that changed the trajectory of this massive,

massive media empire. We always understood that part of that story was going to be understanding how much this mattered to Sherry Redstone. And what I mean by that is right before Moonves gets ousted from CBS,

He launches what amounts to a coup against Sherry Redstone and the Redstone family because he does not appreciate that she is, in his mind, meddling in his business. Sherry Redstone, you know, right around 2018 is talking to Moonves about how she wants to merge Viacom and CX.

CBS. And at that time, CBS was doing very well and Viacom was really struggling, as many legacy media businesses have been, with changes in the media landscape, streaming, all of that. Sherry thought the two companies should be united. Media companies need scale. Moonves did not want to hear that. And he resented her from inserting herself in his view. And

he and his loyalists on the board of directors of CBS decide to launch a lawsuit that would have stripped the Redstone family of control of the Redstone family business. And Jim and I wanted our readers to understand what that would have felt like for Sherry Redstone, which was a gut punch. It was a gut punch for her, not just because it was the family business and not just because she had considered Les Moonves to be a friend of hers, but because she had just finished writing

fighting to get these two women, Manuela Herzl and Sydney Holland, out of her father's life. And then to turn around and face this lawsuit that would strip her of control or threaten her place once again after just winning this very painful battle. We wanted our readers to understand what the stakes were, what the emotional stakes were, and where this whole thing would have fallen within the timeline of Sherry Redstone's relationship with her father and her family and the business.

What does the story of this one media mogul tell us about the structural issues that

in the media industry today. You've said that this should be taught in business schools. One of the big lessons here is about corporate governance or the lack thereof, that all of these people who were supposed to be looking out for the best interests of shareholders absolutely failed to do so. And what I mean by that is when the board of directors of CBS learned about rumors that their CEO, Les Moonvesse,

could be or had been accused of sexual misconduct, they did basically nothing. I mean, what they did was they hired an outside lawyer to essentially ask Moonves, hey, is there anything we should be worried about? And took him at his word when he basically said no.

And Sherry Redstone was furious at the time, as is detailed in our book. She writes a letter to the board of directors basically saying, I can't believe that you would call this an investigation. This is not an investigation. And the board of directors, you know, their response to some of these rumors or accusations of misconduct is at one point, one of them says, I don't care if 100 women or 50 women come forward with evidence.

more accusations about Moonves. He's our guy. And that's so preposterous. Moonves is not anybody's guy on the board of directors. The board of directors represent the shareholders in CBS. And this book really shows you these corporate boards, which are often made up of people who have to attend a handful of meetings a year, not really do too much. They get to take a nice paycheck home when there is an actual crisis and problem to be dealt with.

This is a window into an incredible case where they just completely failed to step up to the plate and react appropriately. So I think that it really tells you something about corporate governance in corporate America that goes beyond the media industry. Rachel Abrams is the co-author of Unscripted, The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy. Rachel, thank you very much. Thank you so much. This is a pleasure. Thank you.

And that's the show. On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondio, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Calendar, and Candice Wong, with help from Pamela Appiah. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer this week was Brendan Dalton. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone. ♪